Does a dual-task selectively inhibit the metacognitive activities in text revision?

The effect of cognitive overload on production deficiency in metacognitive activities was investigated using a dual-task paradigm. Undergraduate students (N = 54) were assigned to one of two conditions, the dual-task condition and the non-dual-task condition. They completed a text revision task that included two types of problems, word level errors and disorganized construction. The construction improvement was assumed to require metacognitive activities from the readers' point of view. Participants in the dual-task condition counted the number of auditory presentations of a target word while revising the given text. The results indicated that the performance level of construction improvement was lower in the dual-task condition than in the non-dual-task condition, while there was no difference in word error correction between the two conditions. It is interpreted that metacognitive activities, such as monitoring and control in text revision for comprehensibility from the readers' perspective, are selectively impaired by cognitive overload. This study experimentally demonstrated that cognitive overload caused a production deficiency in metacognitive activities. Methodological issues are discussed for future research.